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Same ride, different segments each time?

Hello all,

I ride the same ride multiple times a week. When I look at these rides, the segments listed vary between the rides. One ride will have 3 segments, the other ride will have 2 completely different segments, another ride will have no segments at all, even though I rode the identical ride each time.

Is there a way to fix this problem? Has anyone else seen this?

0 trux over 5 years ago

Yes, it is normal, because of the GPS flucutation and accuracy, the individual key points of the track are each time in a slightly different position, and hence sometimes they will fit the pre-defined segment, and another time they may not. Not much to do, else than keeping the ephemeris file up-to-date (syncing frequently with Garmin Exprress), keeping a distance from walls, buildings, and other obstacles, and running the closest possible to the track of the segment. However, already the segments are often recorded with bad GPS data, so you need to zoom them on the map to the max, and investigate how close they fit to the road, or on wich side of the road they deviate. You can also try activating the option GPS+Glonass (later in 2020, Galileo's satellite fleet should be completed, and promisses better accuracy, but it is not the case yet), and the Every Second Recording, if you do not mind the higher battery power consumption. And as I wrote, it may not help, if the GPS deviations are already in the segment (which is indeed often the case).

0 DropTheHammer over 5 years ago in reply to trux

I do use Every Second Recording.

If this is the answer, Garmin needs to massage the GPS data so that rides on the same roads are all detected. I have the same data in Strava and Garmin, and Strava shows me on a segment on Road X over 200 times, while Garmin shows only 17 times. Strava has applied some coding skills to this problem to show all the rides that should go together. Clearly Garmin needs to apply some kind of smoothing algorithm so that GPS errors or plus or minus a few feet are ignored.

Is there way to request this fix? Does Garmin read these forums?

0 trux over 5 years ago in reply to DropTheHammer

The problem is that there are very often segments on paralel roads, trails, or on pathes very close to each other, which in past led often to mixup up of inapropriate segments to activities that were in fact done on a different track. I saw it happening often on my river bank runs - there are segment on both banks of the river, as well as on the pavement and roads above the river bank. In the past, the activity could be easily assigned a wrong segment.

It looks like Garmin recently reduced the tolerance, to avoid such kind of mixups, and to reduce the number of complaints. Just this week, I reran the function "Match New Segments" on some old activitiies, and a number of previously matching segments was in fact removed, instead of added, hence it is clear the tolerance was reduced recently.

DropTheHammer said:
Is there way to request this fix? Does Garmin read these forums?

Apart from the tips in my previous post, you could also export the activity in GPX format, edit the individual keypoints so, that they better match the concerned segment, and then importing it back to Garmin Connect.

The main purpose of this user forum is the mutual help of users. Garmin employees peek in, up and then with an announcement (mostly on the device specific forums), and exceptionally it happens that they comment in a thread, but it is very unikely they would follow every thread. If you have a specific issue that you want to bring to Garmin's attention, you need to contact them directly though one of the channels they made availabe on their support website

0 DropTheHammer over 5 years ago in reply to trux

Oh well, now that Strava has taken away segments from non-premium users, I was hoping to switch to Garmin. But if Garmin only assigns 17 of my 200 identical rides to a segment, then Garmin is useless to me as far as segments go.

0 trux over 5 years ago in reply to DropTheHammer

As I wrote, contact the Support. If they have no feedback, it is unlikely they would change anything